Tag: Michel Simon

L’Atalante (1934)

Vigo’s gorgeous, marvellous, magical film is his only finished work but exceeds the resumes of director’s with dozens of credits

Director: Jean Vigo

Cast: Michel Simon (Père Jules), Dita Parlo (Juliette), Jean Dasté (Jean), Gilles Margaritis (The Peddler), Louis Lefebvre (The cabin boy)

In his short life Jean Vigo made only L’Atalante, the anarchic short film Zéro de conduit (a surrealist black comedy about rebellious school kids) and two brief documentaries on Nice and the swimmer Jean Taris. But you could argue, in L’Atalante alone, he presented the sort of cinematic resume that would make a director with decades of work behind them green with envy. Vigo shot L’Atalante’s astonishing mix of poetry and realism while dying from tuberculosis (he may even have never seen the final film, leaving instructions for the shooting of its final shot and the final trims for its editing) but he would surely have been delighted at the film’s lasting impact.

It’s story, like some of the greatest, is beautifully simple. Juliette (Dita Parlo) is a country girl who marries Jean (Jean Dasté), captain of a commercial canal barge L’Atalante, crewed by young cabin boy (Louis Lefebvre) and crusty old sea dog Père Jules (Michel Simon). Juliette dreams of escaping her village to see the sights of Paris, Jean’s dreams are more humdrum and the clash between these will play out over the first days of their marriage as the couple get to know each other, feel the first flush of passion and go through their first real argument. Will love find a way to bring them back together?

L’Atalante takes this simple set-up, and invests it with something truly magical and universal, in a film crammed with as much cinematic bravura and beauty as it is gentle observation of human foibles. You can see why a film as beautifully assured and playful as this has such a legion of admirers. It mixes detailed observation of Jean and Juliette walking through the industrial docks of the various towns they stop at (shots that look like they come straight from Godard) with splashes of magical realism, as Jean throws himself into the canal to experience a mystical vision of Juliette dancing underwater. It’s a film that shifts and embodies different moods and styles from moment to moment while feeling like a remarkably coherent whole.

It’s also a strikingly humane film which develops richly multi-layered characters of intriguing depth and contradictions. Juliette and Jean’s marriage is, in many ways, a true love match (it will become clear that Juliette honestly believes in Jean as her soul mate), but Vigo still shoots the marriage procession (from church to barge) like a funeral march, black-clad villagers following behind pair-by-pair and standing at the dock staring as they depart like mourners. (There is even a low-angle tracking shot taking us past a foreboding grandmother, almost like she’s a prophet of doom). From the beginning, Vigo makes clear that there is a disconnect somewhere along the line here, between romantic hopefulness and the reality of two people who have perhaps made an impulsive decision.

Juliette boards the boat, but heads straight to the prow to stare forward into the mist (how unclear is that future!), startled when Jean approaches (he frequently struggles to find her in the barge, including losing her in the mist). It feels at first as if this is a marriage of convenience between two strangers: so much so that it’s a surprise that Juliette seems to remember herself and allows herself to be wrapped into Jean’s warm embrace. And Vigo shows their obvious sexual bond as soon as they relax.

It leads into a scene that plays like a few days of a glorious honeymoon. They share a bed together (so passionately, that when one of Père Jules’ many cats spawns a litter on their bed, Jules jokes they must be the parents), they laugh and joke and playfully wrestle on the roof of the barge. Jean crawls across the barge roof towards the waking Juliette first thing in the morning like a cat in heat. They are a couple who cast aside any hesitancy or shyness they felt at first into a burst of giggling, heady passion.

It’s also though a passion that’s matched with a mix of poetic romanticism. Juliette tells Jean she saw a vision of him when she plunged her head into a bowl of water years ago. It’s a feeling, it becomes clear, she has total faith in – it’s part of the deeply charming romanticism that’s in Dita Parlo’s beautiful performance as Juliette, who is both a fragile dreamer and a hardened realist who can just get on with it. So much so, that she’s more than a little annoyed when Jean implicitly mocks it by sticking his head into first the bowl and then plunged into the canal itself and claims, try as he might, that he can’t see her vision at all. He’s joking of course, but she really means it.

And perhaps she’s right, since Vigo returns to this theme with the full force of romantic poetic realism in the film’s final act. But first that has to come after the couple have found themselves in far more tumultuous waters. Juliette finds the rough-and-ready life of Jean on the boat (where he stuffs his laundry mountain into a cupboard almost literally for a rainy day) trying, throwing herself into domestic drudgery to add some order. It’s a pay off she’s willing to make, while sewing a dress to wear around the streets of Paris Jean has promised to take her. Dreams shattered, when the rest of the crew leave the barge when it is docked there forcing Jean to cancel their planned night (much to her crushing disappointment).

Jean offers her a back-up at Le Havre, taking her to a dance bar – where, to his jealous fury, Juliette enjoys dancing far more with a garrulous, charming, relaxed peddler (Gilles Margaritis, with energy pouring out of him). We already know Jean can be jealous – he throws a teenage-angst fit of rage when catching Juliette spending time alone with Jules, smashing parts of the room up). When Juliette sneaks into town, its enough for Jules to disappear over the horizon with his barge.

So far, so everyday realism of a marriage gone wrong, a love match founded on shallow roots. Only Vigo returns to the magic realism he had played with earlier. Separated by miles, the depressed Jean and the lonely Juliette seem to bond and hear each other from miles apart. Sleeping, they toss and turn in a mix of frustration, loneliness and increasingly erotic connection as the film cuts between the two of them. Jean runs from his bed to hurl himself into the canal, to see the vision of Juliette. Suddenly we are in a film of almost magical unreality, where spiritual and vocal bonds (like Jane Eyre) stretch over miles and bring people together in ways they can’t imagine.

It’s also fitting that the couple’s reconciliation is powered by Michel Simon’s Père Jules, who had at first seemed like the ogre at the heart of the ship. Simon’s performance is animalistically brilliant, a lunk of a man with seemingly bestial appetites (and there is a sneaking suspicion part of Juliette is excited by his rawness) who also displays a sensitive, tender side. His den on the boat is filled with exotic mementoes of his life on the seas (including the severed hand in a bottle of an old friend who he talks about with the wistfulness of a lover), as is his tattoo-covered body. He will delicately repair a gramophone, loom over Juliette with sexual suggestiveness and the dance around for her entertainment in a patchwork dress. It’s a brilliant, visceral, inventive performance.

It’s part of a patchwork put together with such luminescent brilliance by Vigo, that even thinking back on how it’s staged and assembled is exciting and moving. L’Atalante constantly stuns and surprises, with the gorgeousness of its filming and the power of its emotions and sexuality. It manages to take a story that could feel small and everyday and give it a quiet mythic force that lends it a universality. So brilliantly done is the film, that it makes you even more heart-broken that Vigo was not granted the time for a full body of work. But it this was to be his only film, it was a beauty.

The Train (1964)

Burt Lancaster takes on the Nazis and the schedule in The Train

Director: John Frankenheimer

Cast: Burt Lancaster (Labiche), Paul Scofield (Colonel von Waldheim), Jeanne Moreau (Christine), Suzanne Flon (Miss Villard), Michel Simon (Pape Boule), Wolfgang Priess (Major Herren), Albert Rémy (Didont), Charles Millot (Presquet)

The German occupation of France draws to its close. Paris will fall in days to the Allies. As the Germans evacuate, Colonel von Waldheim (Paul Scofield) has other plans. All that fabulous modern art – all that stuff the Nazis call degenerate, the likes of Cezanne, Renoir and Monet – that he has kept jealously guarded and locked up for years would be worth a tidy packet if he can get it back to Germany. Or is it that von Waldheim just loves the paintings so much he can’t let them go? Either way, he’s determined to load these priceless masterpieces onto a train and take them back into Germany – with rail network manager (and secret resistance fighter) Labiche (Burt Lancaster) bought in to lay on and then run the train. But will Labiche be willing to risk resistance and railway lives to prevent this looting of France’s cultural heritage?

John Frankenheimer’s rollicking, dark-edged war film mixes in serious questions amongst its compelling explosions and train wrecks. Namely – is any human life worth the cost of protecting a nation’s artistic heritage? Or in other words, what are we fighting for when we protect the nation – the people who live in it, or the ideas that underpin what a nation is? Because what von Waldheim is pinching here is a large chunk of France’s heritage – and it would be irreplaceable – and for many in the resistance it’s risks are acceptable to stop that. Even as the bodies start to pile up.

The Train is a slightly nihilistic war film, in which the vast majority of the cast wind up dead, leaving the survivors to wonder if those paintings were worth the dozens of lives lost to protect them. Frankenheimer even hammers it home in the conclusion by cross cutting between the bodies of the victims with the packing crates (each carefully labelled with an artist’s name), making the paintings seem even more like chilling tombstones. The Germans, rarely thinking for more than a second before gunning down resistance fighters or anyone caught working with them.

In this they take their lead from von Waldheim. Played with glacial chilliness by Paul Scofield, von Waldheim at first appears a reasonable, even decent man. But it becomes clear that this well-spoken, polite man has a mono-mania for art that trumps all considerations of human life. Von Waldheim believes art should belong only to those who can understand it, and clearly cares nothing for human lives around him, all of whom are disposable should he choose. Under his gaze, civilians are put against the wall without a second thought and soldiers instructed to meet all attempts at slowing the train with lethal force. Frankenheimer carefully builds over the course of the film von Waldheim’s unhinged amorality, culminating in a series of Dutch angles as he finally goes further than even his own soldiers will follow.

As his counterpoints we have the muscular humanity of Burt Lancaster. Focusing all his experience as an acrobat and circus performer in his youth, the film is a tribute to Lancaster’s athleticism. With Frankenheimer using a series of tracking shots and uninterrupted long shots, we are shown that without doubt it’s Lancaster jumping from moving trains, rolling down hills, jumping walls and bounding across roofs. Lancaster’s commitment also stretched to mastering many train engineering tasks with such success that he was able to perform them (uncut!) on film.

Performance-wise the part falls carefully into Lancaster’s strengths as a tough-guy with a heart. And while at times he feels like what he is – a Hollywood star parachuted into the French countryside to do battle with the Germans – he nevertheless carries the film with a charismatic ease. His emoting – particularly in several speeches decrying the human cost of the operation – verges on the overly emphatic, but few other actors could have carried the near wordless final half an hour with such aplomb. Lancaster’s moral certainty and enraged humanity also makes a perfect contrast with Scofield’s distant amorality and coldness.

The action then takes place on a series of trains that have even greater impact because you know, unlike today, everything was done for real. Each of the crashes, explosions, de-railings and train-based stunt has the freshness and excitement of reality behind it. The real events that inspired the film saw the French Resistance prevent the art train leaving Paris through drowning it in red tape. But that’s a lot less exciting than an ingenious “wrong stations” routine or a desperate chase across the French countryside (and very few Hollywood directors shot France as well as Frankenheimer).

It all makes for an exciting cocktail, even if the central ideas of art vs. life are not explored as well as they could be. It captures that 1960s feeling of “war is hell” as bodies pile up, and Jeanne Moreau’s hotel owner gets a speech on the emptiness of men killing each other. Sometimes you feel The Train wants to delve deeper into the psychology and cost of its events – but then it slaps another train into a collision and decides to be as much a “man on a mission” film. Either way, it adds enough depth to make it a rewarding watch.

Quai des Brumes (1938)

Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan are star-crossed lovers in Quai des Brumes

Director: Marcel Carné

Cast: Jean Gabin (Jean), Michel Simon (Zabel), Michèle Morgan (Nelly), Pierre Brasseur (Lucien), Édouard Delmont (Panama), Raymond Aimos (Quart Vittel), Robert Le Vigan (Le peintre), René Génin (Le docteur), Marcel Pérès (Le chauffeur), Léo Malet (Le soldat), Jenny Burnay (L’amie de Lucien)

It translates as “Port of Shadows” and it’s the shadows you are likely to remember in this noirish tinged classic of French cinema. A major success story when it was released in France, it also stands as some sort of milestone as being one of the few films condemned by both the pre-Vichy French government and Nazi Germany. More pleasingly, it’s also a firm testament to the brilliance and vibrancy of pre-War French cinema and the creative imagination of Marcel Carné.

Jean (Jean Gabin) is a soldier on the run, deserting his regiment to lead his own life in South America. Arriving in the port of Le Havre, he ends up in a run-down bar on the edge of the town where he meets the beautiful young Nelly (Michèle Morgan) a woman on the run herself from two unpleasant men. The first is local gangster Lucien (Pierre Brasseur) a braggart with whom Jean has already had a few run-ins. The other, even more dangerous, is Zabel (Michel Simon) Nelly’s godfather, a ruthless man under a genial façade who is obsessed with Nelly. Jean and Nelly fall in love, but how far will Jean go to put his own hopes for the future in doubt to protect Nelly?

Shadows dominate Carné’s beautifully atmospheric film. Jean emerges as if from nowhere on the road to Le Havre – nearly run over by the truck driver who picks him up. The bar is buried in the mists of the town. Shadows loom from every building and throw most of the city into a mysterious half-light. The action largely takes place in backrooms and cellars. Every frame tells you from the start things will not turn out well, with every decision carrying an underplayed air of foreboding. You can just tell every moment is putting another nail in the coffin of Jean’s chances of escape to that new life. The film is a brilliant slice of noir, expertly assembled with an artist’s eye by Carné, one of the most overlooked genius directors of his era.

This darkened, gloomy style of the picture echoes the intentions of Carné and his regular collaborator, scriptwriter Jacques Prévert. The focus on the picture is the individual – in this case Jean and Nelly –trying to escape the control of both the state (the army) and also the domineering bullies that hold the local power (Lucien and Zabel). It’s no coincidence that Jean is an army deserter, and there is no sense of guilt on his part or even a fraction of recrimination is aimed towards him from anyone he encounters. Jean himself talks despairingly of the grim reality of killing and his wish to make his own choices. Carné was originally to make the film in Germany, but Goebbels was not having any film made in Berlin where the hero was an army deserter.

So instead the film was shifted – wisely – back to France, not the French government was that happy either. With Carné and Prévert’s vision of a listless, tired, corrupted France where people like Jean simply refuse (it seems) to do what they are told, and where the few representatives of local government we meet are trivial non-entities, it’s not a surprise that the film was soon being blamed for sapping French spirit. As a sop to the French criticism of the script (and many of the films backers were desperate for its downbeat nihilism to be replaced by a more conventional upbeat, romantic ending) Jean does at least show respect for his army uniform – despite everything it’s never dirty, and when he takes it off its neatly folded. Today it seems even more like an impressionistic touch.

It’s the nihilism that runs through the film. We know Jean is good guy – he encounters a dog on the road to Le Havre that follows him with a singular devotion, unable to bear being parted from him – but the film itself has a shadowy feeling of despair and destruction throughout. Jean feels like a doomed hero from the start, a passive figure despite his bravado, who impulsively drifts from event to event – it’s when he chooses to become engaged that he dooms himself. Nelly is seemingly at first a femme fatale – and her reveal is a masterstroke of cinema – but really she’s as much a victim as Jean, someone very vulnerable, lonely and scared who wants a way out but can’t see how to even begin to find one. But then even the nemesis that runs through the film is low-key and trivial – Lucien is a joke, while Zabel for all his creepiness is also little more than a novelty gift shop owner.

The power of the film comes from seeing these two trapped figures surrounded by a world of darkness, listless depression and emptiness. And of course from the performances. The film is a reminder again that at this time Jean Gabin may well have been the greatest actor in the world. With a cigarette dangling, raffish cool under a surly salt-of-the-earth taciturnity, he turns Jean into the sort of enigmatic noir-hero years before the term was evented. Dripping with charisma in every frame, he’s both a Bogartish cynic and a De Niroish slice of muscle, a working class martyr. Nearly as good is Michèle Morgan, vulnerable and yearning into a surface of sexy cool. The two make a winningly attractive pair, not just sexy but with a growing romantic feeling.

It’s no wonder Jean throws himself into threatening and roughing up the pathetically weasily Lucien (Pierre Brasseur very good as a weak-willed bully who can lash out with the viciousness of a child) and squaring up to domineering Zabel. Michel Simon is terrific as the grandfatherly shop owner whose own dark obsessions and possible perversions become harder and harder to ignore. These two very different threats stand at opposite ends of the film and both contribute to its bleak ending.

Because of course Jean isn’t going to make that boat. The act of violence the film finally unleashes – after all that foreboding warning that it’s coming – is suitably shocking in a 1930s way, while the eventual fall of Jean is both fitting and also tragic in its low-key abruptness (it was later echoed by Brian de Palma in Carlito’s Way). With its gloomy atmosphere, its grim foreboding but also passionate love story at its heart, Quai des Brumes is a classic of French poetic realism.